ABSTRACT
Our understanding of the primordial Universe largely depends on the information from spatial correlations of cosmic-scale matter distributions. Recently, the advances of the “cosmological bootstrap” program offers new perspectives and powerful tools to study these cosmological correlators. Starting from fundamental principles only, we aim to build a timeless description for our Universe. In this talk, I will first review the exciting developments of this new direction. Then I will apply the bootstrap approach to systematically classify the leading observational target — primordial non-Gaussianities (bispectrum) from cosmic inflation, incorporating three scenarios: i) single field inflation; ii) cosmological colliders; iii) multi-field inflation. Interestingly, the bootstrap analysis predict new phenomenologies, which are testable in even in today’s cosmological surveys. In the end, I will present a comprehensive data analysis of these predictions using the latest CMB observation from Planck satellite. In an updated search using both CMB-Best and Modal pipelines, we identify the most significant signal of cosmological collider in our current CMB dataset.
BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Wang Dong Gang received his Master degree from University of Science and Technology of China in 2016, and Doctoral degree from Leiden University in 2020. After that he joined the University of Cambridge as a Research Associate, and later became a Rubicon Senior Fellow at the Stephen Hawking Centre for Theoretical Cosmology and the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. In January 2025, he joined HKUST as a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and concurrently as a Junior Fellow in the HKUST Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study. His research focuses on Primordial Cosmology, and in particular possible connections with high energy physics theories, including the bootstrap approach, holography and string theory.
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